Tomatillos! ~ Ham Pie Sandwiches

23 August 2009

Tomatillos!

These came in the CSA box the other day.

Guess what: SALSA.

I based this very, very loosely off a Deborah Madison recipe for tomatillo-avocado salsa. Mostly I just needed to know how long to cook the tomatillos, and whether I should be cooking onions and jalapeños and etc or leaving them raw. It turns out that both are viable options, which I'm sure you are shocked to hear. Shocked.

Salsa verde!

tomatillos
onion
jalapeño pepper
garlic
water
lime juice/white wine vinegar
salt
a stick blender or other pulverizing device

First, husk your tomatillos and chop them in half. Since my tomatillos were gigantic, I quartered them. Whatever floats your boat. I used every single one of those tomatillos up there. Yes! Tomatillos!

Peel and roughly chop an onion; I used a large yellow one. Stem and halve a jalapeño or two, depending on your desire for hot pepper. Adjust seeds if you have an issue with pepper-based heat. I used one and a half jalapeños, seeds in. Smash and peel several cloves of garlic.

Put everything in a saucepan with a couple cups of water. You can reserve some of the jalapeño, garlic, or onion if you want to add it raw later. Do this if you like spicy salsa; I saved half a pepper and a couple cloves of garlic for what still turned out to be a fairly mild salsa.

Cook the salsa for 10 to 15 minutes, or until your tomatillos have turned a more olive green. Take it off the heat, let it cool a little, and puree it by any means you find acceptable. I don't know about you, but there's no molcajete at my house; I used the stick blender.

Now is the time for seasoning. Mix in a generous pinch of salt, an acid, and any vegetables you might have reserved before, chopped finely. For the acid, you can use the juice of half a lime (or a whole one, or a lemon) or a spoonful of white wine vinegar. We didn't have any citrus, so I went for the vinegar. While this seemed a little genre-mixy at first, it worked fine.

You can also add cilantro, if you don't live in a cilantro-hating household.

Now eat it!

Clearly this salsa loves chips. It also clearly loves several other things. For example, it loves beans and rice. It loves burritos. It loves a scrambled or even a fried egg. It LOVES fish. Eat it!!

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